Writers and Money: The Millions Interviews Manjula Martin

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The grim economic prospects of being an artist are well-established, but the cold, hard numbers behind writing and publishing — particularly in the digital age — are mystifying even to many of the people who are trying to make a living doing it. Anything that illuminates the financial realities of the writing game becomes a precious commodity; essays featuring frank money talk tear through the internet, g-chats and Slack channels hum, aspiring novelists desperately glean what they can from Publishers Marketplace before their (tax-deductible) $25 runs out.

Enter Manjula Martin, the woman behind Who Pays Writers?, a hugely valuable resource for freelancers trying to figure out the numbers behind bylines. Martin established the site in 2012 to bring transparency to the woefully opaque writing business using crowdsourcing: writers anonymously offer up the rates they were paid by various publications. The following year, Martin expanded the territory with Scratch, a magazine about money and writing co-founded with the writer Jane Friedman. This spring, Scratch the magazine became Scratch the book, an anthology on “Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living,” with contributions from writers including Roxane Gay, Jonathan Franzen, Kiese Laymon, and Cheryl Strayed (we excerpted Sari Botton’s fascinating essay on ghostwriting here at the site).

Martin lives in San Francisco, where she writes and edits in addition to her full-time job as Managing Editor of Zoetrope: All Story, the literary magazine founded by Francis Ford Coppola and Adrienne Brodeur. Martin and I are friends — coworkers, too, as all freelancers are coworkers — and she agreed to speak with me about the numbers behind her book and the contradictions of making art under capitalism.

The Millions: You are currently nearing the end of a book tour that has you working a full-time day job during the week and hopping a plane every weekend to a new city. Is this bonkers?

Manjula Martin: Yes. But geographically and plane ticket-wise, it actually made no sense to do the tour dates all in a row. It’s not cheaper.

TM: And you’re paying for this out of pocket.

MM: Yes.

TM: Is it customary for publishers to not pay for a book tour?

MM: I’m told that it’s common, unless you’re a very big investment for the publisher. But while the publisher has not paid for it, they have been incredibly helpful in terms of booking the gigs — the PR department has surpassed my expectations in that regard.

TM: I guess that’s a form of money.

MM: That is a form of money. That’s labor. A lot of authors don’t get book tour help at all. I was fortunate enough to get some free advice from Lauren Cerand, an amazing (not free) independent publicist. She told me, “Just do a book tour, put it on your credit card if you have to. It’ll be great.” So far, it’s been great. She’s right.

TM: Could you share the numbers of the book as a whole: what you were paid, how the contributors were paid or not paid, and all of that?

MM: I went into the anthology with a really solid table of contents; the book proposal I wrote had pretty much the same table of contents as the book did once it was done. The essays weren’t written, but I had gotten buy-in from most of the contributors, and I had a well-developed topic. I’m convinced that this is what sold the book: the editors could see how the contents would inform the topic, and they could understand that I had access to very high-caliber contributors.

There were a lot of emails right when I was first doing the book proposal along the lines of “Hey, I’m thinking of doing an essay collection. Would you like to sign onto this not knowing any of the details or timing or anything?” People said yes, which was wonderful. My agent sold the book. I got an advance. The advance was $30,000, paid in three different installments. As of this writing I’m still waiting for the last installment, the installment “upon publication.” The way my contract was set up gave me the majority chunk, on signing; a smaller chunk upon delivery and acceptance of the manuscript. (By the way, this is not when you turn in the manuscript, it’s when the manuscript is done. It’s not like, “Hello, editor, here’s the first time you’ve seen it.” It’s like, we’ve been working on it for six months and now it’s done and they’re going to send it into production.) Then the final installment upon publication.

The way my contract is set up is, I am the “Author” of the book. My contract is with the publisher. Then I have basically subcontracted with all of the contributors. The contributors and I have separate contracts. My agent just found me a template for that contract language.

TM: What were you left with after you paid all the subcontractors?

MM: Each of the contributors were paid between $100 and $400 for their essays, depending on whether it was a reprint. Everyone who wrote a new essay got more. The reprints were less and usually between $100 and $200, depending on various situations including whether or not they did additional work on the piece. What anthology contributors get for that few hundred dollars: they’re in the book. They can sell second serial if they want to. That’s basically it. In this particular situation my publisher owns the first serial rights. That’s pretty common. We don’t have a royalty agreement with the contributors.

TM: So how does this all break down in the end, money-wise?

MM: The advance was $30,000. Agents take 15%. That’s $4,500. Contributors were $7,050 total. That leaves $18,000-ish before taxes. For 2015 and 2016, the years that cover that income, I will have paid about $8,500 in taxes. All told I will have paid probably a third of the advance in taxes, but it’s been spread out over a couple of years. I can write off the agent commission and the contributor fees. That should leave me with about $10,000…

TM: That’s not too shabby.

MM: … before book tour costs, which will probably be around $3,500, I’m guessing. So I think I’m going to end up with $6,000-$7,000 for two years of work. Plus the prior two years of unpaid work I did on Scratch mag and Who Pays Writers?.

TM: That’s not a living wage.

MM: No. But I also don’t know what the P&L for Scratch looks like, so I don’t know how much money Simon & Schuster is going to make off of it.

TM: What’s P&L?

MM: Profit and loss statement. It’s what an editor at a publishing house does to figure out how much to pay for a book, what it’s worth, what they think it’ll make. It’s how an editor pitches a book to the rest of the team; a P&L is the way they figure out, “If we pay the advance this much and then the royalties are this much, and it costs this much for the book, this is how many books we have to sell to make a profit.” Actually, Scratch just went to a second printing.

TM: So you should get royalties soon!

MM: [laughs] That doesn’t mean that it’s earned out the advance. It’s a highly relative statement.

TM: I went to one of your readings, where three contributors spoke. That reading became a conversation about workers’ rights and empowering women writers — there was a lot of counsel from participants not to write for free, that you should always be paid for your work. But then [our mutual friend] Caille Millner gave advice along the lines of, “If you want to be a writer, you should expect to have a day job,” which in some ways obviates the other elements of the discussion. I mean, both pieces of advice can be correct, but her comment was a tacit acknowledgment that even when you are paid for your work, it’s not enough. I don’t know many writers who don’t have a day job.

MM: Particularly writers who don’t have other support.

TM: And from freelancing myself, and particularly from my years with The Millions, I have confronted the harsh truth that your/my/our work often has very little or no market value as it is assigned by our cultural and economic system, particularly as it plays out online. It certainly does not usually translate to a robust income (or big revenue for this website, for example).

MM: And there’s no meaningful correlation between monetary value and quality.

TM: One of the contributors to the Scratch anthology, who wasn’t present at that reading, talks about this problem, and describes how she wrote for free…

MM: Yes, Nina MacLaughlin.

TM: …and then got a book deal as a result.

MM: Directly from that free piece. Yeah, there’s not really an answer to these contradictions, but I do think we should start airing these financial realities. And to your larger point, it’s perhaps as it should be that great writing is not necessarily something that someone wants to click on and pay for. I don’t know. As you were saying before the interview, the kinds of essays that I want to write, the kinds of novels I love to read, are probably the kinds of things that are not going to be viral hits or whatever. A small number of people will read them, but they are still valuable, because they will really fucking matter to that small number of people. And hence to humanity.

They way I’ve been thinking about it is that art doesn’t necessarily fit into capitalism. There’s no real profit motive in literature, even great literature. I think what we discover when we all start talking about this is that, first of all, there are tons of contradictions, as you just stated. But what concerns me is that the position of art in capitalism typically means that people, myself included, with slightly (or vastly) more economic privilege, are the only people who are writing. I am middle class (although right now in San Francisco, where I live, I am probably the very bottom of the lower middle class, but San Francisco is crazytown). I can work on a book for two years and only make $7,000 from it, because I also have a job that I work at all the time. I’m not exactly rolling in it, but I’m okay. I’m not going hungry. I don’t have to stagger which utility bill to pay every month. Not everyone is like that. Some people cannot afford to work for free, and so it becomes a real problem when an entire industry is set up that way. This works across art forms, by the way — you see the same thing when you talk with painters. It’s maybe even harder for painters, because they have to have a physical studio and expensive equipment.

So on the one hand I’m like yeah, people who do work should be paid. On the other hand…there is a way in which artistic value cannot be quantified. These two things can be true at the same time. But I think where things become far less ambivalent is when it comes to writing for publications and companies that make a lot of money off your work while you’re not making money off your work.

TM: Certainly.

MM: Exploitation is a lot more clear-cut, and that’s why I encourage people to understand where the money comes from in media and publishing (which is not to say that I myself entirely understand the deep economics of both those industries!). That’s why I think Choire Sicha’s essay in the book is really great, because it breaks down the way websites actually make money. We should know this. We work for them.

When I started doing Who Pays Writers?, people said “Yay, everyone’s naming numbers.” But I wanted more context. Why did you only get paid this much? What was the situation? Did you pitch, or did they approach you? That need for context evolved into Scratch mag. Then again, I also hear the flip side a lot, which is that freelancers just want numbers to figure out how to conduct their business.

Naming numbers is a radical act and it is important to have transparency, particularly in a business where nobody knows how it works because it doesn’t really work any one way for any one person, and there isn’t a set career path. But I realized pretty early on that if we restrict the conversation to just the numbers, there’s a lot that we’re ignoring. If you only talk about numbers, you’re not talking about all of the cultural and historical, and economic, and emotional issues around money that actually really do affect how — and whether — people make money.

TM: There are so many things about the digital economy that seem to invite exploitation, but then you also hear that many books never earn back their advance. As if the publishers are doing some sort of charity work.

MM: Ha. Well, publishing isn’t a charity; someone must be making money. And, much like nonprofits, the publishing industry tends to attract people who already have financial resources. If you don’t happen to come from the middle or upper classes, or an Ivy League-adjacent school, and you’d like to work in publishing — or start out as a full-time writer — you’re fucked. Because the pay is awful. And I’m very interested in how all that affects the stories we end up reading, with journalism as well as with books.

This was very much on my mind as I was doing the anthology, obviously. I wanted to make sure that I was compensating people enough for their work. I’ve been told that $400 is actually a really high amount to pay for an anthology essay, which is horrible and sad.

TM: You’re now the “writers and money” person. Is that your forever beat?

MM: Maybe? I’m not sure how I feel about that! I’m writing a novel! This wasn’t a topic I set out to be an “Expert” in, or really focus on. This project evolved very organically in different ways. A lot of it was just based on me noticing that people really wanted to talk about it, and going, all right, let’s roll with that and see what happens

TM: You followed the market!

MM: Ha. I remember when I had first had the idea to do Scratch magazine and was talking about it with Jane Friedman, who co-founded it with me, I actually thought of doing an anthology. Then I thought, No, that seems like a lot of work for no money. What if we made it a paid subscription thing and it was a magazine? There were enough stories to have it be a periodical. Then cut to a year and a half later. [laughs]

I suppose for me this project could be chalked up to that cheesy “say yes” thing. While I think it can also be very powerful to say no, for me, this whole experience was very much an exercise in saying, “Well this isn’t really the thing I set out to do, but it seems to be that I have a take on it that people value. Sure!” Not like, the masses are clamoring, but there was obvious interest.

In terms of my expertise, all it takes to be an expert is experience. And confidence. I’ve always felt like writing is my hobby, but I have in fact made my living as a writer for many, many years — copywriting, journalism, freelance essays — up until now, when I’m working as an editor. At some point recently I was bemoaning my lack of Expertise to my partner, and he said, “You’ve been making a living as a writer for 10 years. You are an expert in this.” I was like, “Oh, right. Yeah, I guess I am.”

TM: You didn’t think of yourself necessarily as a capital-W writer.

MM: Exactly. I like to tell that story because there is no capital-W writer when you’re in it. Few people think they’re a capital-W writer. There are so many different ways of doing it.

TM: And now you’re writing a novel that takes place in Santa Cruz.

MM: Yes, in the dystopian near past, also known as the late 1980s.

MM: And doing a second book.

MM: Yes! A seemingly random topical departure: I am writing a gardening book with my dad, who is an expert on organic gardening and farming. We’re writing a guide to growing fruit trees for Ten Speed Press. Alice Waters is writing the foreword! It will be in stores in 2019.

TM: I know that we’ve just talked about contradictions, but is there one major thing that you wish were different about the writing economy?

MM: I think it’s pretty clear that writers should be paid more. I don’t know where that money comes from, because I don’t know how much money publishers are making off of books. But, as I said, publishing isn’t a charity; someone must be making money. It’s just not always us.

TM: And now there’s probably no more National Endowment for the Arts.

MM: I feel that increasingly there’s no concept of how art is important in this society, even without the funding. I think that’s really scary and I think that it makes it even harder to break down some of those access barriers that we already have.

TM: Your day job’s model is basically one of patronage. Is that our best worst option at this point?

MM: I would say it’s not an option to rule out. You know, every model has its flaws and patronage is no more flawed than other models. It certainly is a long-lasting model, which Colin Dickey talks about a little bit in his essay in Scratch, where he looks into the Greek patronage system and the first Greek poet to ask to be paid by the word. But we’ve seen recently with places like Medium that even if you have a benefactor, the benefactor can withdraw their goodwill at any moment. That happens all the time with media companies that have venture capital funding. We need the guys who have no profit motive and want to replace the NEA out of the goodness of their rich bastard hearts.

There’s also the reality of writers who are funded by their spouses, and that gets into a whole other level of micro patronage, I guess you would call it. Right now my boyfriend is doing the laundry, and it was my turn to do the laundry this week, but I was like, “I have this interview.”

My partner and I are also beneficiaries of a government patronage system called rent control. That’s a big deal. I think about that a lot at this political moment too, that there are a few benefits left that self-employed people get from the government. And they didn’t get many in the first place! At our recent Scratch event in Texas, contributor Austin Kleon talked about having his entire family on the ACA and being really freaked out about what will happen. And he makes royalties.

I guess while I think that everyone should get the money — go get the money, please get the money — I do fundamentally think that the arts are not necessarily a thing that should be profitable. That’s not why the arts exist in our society. Part of a healthy society is one that understands that and finds ways to support its artists. With money.

On May 10, 2009, Rodrigo Rosenberg, a hotshot Guatemalan lawyer, was murdered a few blocks away from his house. Days later a video declaration surfaced in which Rodrigo openly accused the then Guatemalan president, Álvaro Colom, of his death. "If you’re watching this video it is because I’ve been murdered,” he said in the recording. Rodrigo also accused Colom of murdering Khalil Musa, one of his clients, and his daughter Marjorie weeks earlier. As the investigation wore on, it was revealed that Rodrigo and Marjorie had been involved in an affair. After a thorough inquiry, the United Nations Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) declared that Rodrigo -- possibly depressed by the death of Marjorie, who he called the love of his life -- had orchestrated his own murder.
This sensational case is the inspiration for The Mastermind (Akashik Books), the latest work by Guatemalan author David Unger. This new thriller presents the acute current state of corruption and political turmoil of Guatemala, as well as the intense, dangerous relationship between Guillermo and Maryam -- Rodrigo and Marjorie’s literary counterparts.
Despite writing exclusively in English, Unger was awarded Guatemala’s Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature 2014. He is the author of the novels The Price of Escape and Life in the Damn Tropics, and he has translated 14 books from Spanish into English. We caught up with David for a quick chat about his new book near his office at CUNY, where he teaches literary translation.
José García: What interested you in this case?
David Unger: A lot of people talked about this story as an example where reality surpasses fiction; as a writer that really bugged me. I took it as a challenge. But also, because I hadn't written anything that dealt with current events in Guatemala. I had written about the Armed Conflict or the United Fruit Company's involvement with the country, but not of what has happened recently, and I wanted to explore that.
JA: What made you want to fictionalize the case? You could’ve done a journalistic piece, or remain closer to the facts, but you didn’t.
DU: In my last novel, The Price of Escape, I did a lot of research about the relationship between former president Jorge Ubico and the United Fruit Company. I wanted to understand the backstory of what happened then.
In this case, I chose not to, primarily because I am familiar with some of Guatemala’s current history. Rodrigo’s case is very recent. I thought I could write a novel without the heavy research I put into the previous book. Also, I was mostly interested in the relationship between Rodrigo and Marjorie.
JA: Something that was mostly overlooked by the media.
DU: We barely know anything about it. We don't know what her relationship with her husband was. What we do know is that there was a lot of passion between Rodrigo and Marjorie. I don’t think he was arrogant enough to think his own death could change the country. But I think he was a very passionate guy who might have felt that the best part of his life was over and that he wasn't going to find another woman like Marjorie. For me, that was the story right there.
JA: You have mentioned that you wanted to remain distant from the facts, to stay away from articles and documentaries. But, did you do any research at all while writing your novel?
DU: No. Zero. I didn't want the fact to affect my fiction. There was an article published in The New Yorker about the case I read a couple of times while writing, but that was just to check some minor facts about the context. I wanted to stay as far away from the facts as possible. I wanted to write the opposite of Truman Capote'sIn Cold Blood.
JA: Can you mention a few other Guatemalan or Central American writers that might help the American audience understand the region?
DU: First Miguel Angel Asturias’s Señor Presidente (The President). Then maybe the novels of Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Javier Mosquera, Victor Montejo, the works of Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Roque Dalton, he’s a poet that needs to be looked into. Then there's Jacinta Escudos or Arturo Arias too, they have been translated into English. Also, there’s an anthology entitled And We Sold the Rainthat included Central American short stories of the late-'80s and early-90s that they might find interesting.
JA: What is the role or responsibility of the fiction writer while dealing with historical events? I’m thinking of The Man in the High Castle or The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.
DU: Primarily I think the writer has to write whatever he or she wants to write about. The writer’s responsibility is to creativity. However, I do think there are some limitations. One cannot write a novel, for example, about José Efraín Ríos Montt (former Guatemalan president officially charged with genocide and crimes against humanity) and mess around with the facts in order to clean his reputation or attend a personal interest. One has a historical responsibility while addressing atrocities.

I think that artificial intelligence, when it comes -- and it will come, I believe -- is going to displace huge numbers of workers. And that’s a crisis, but it’s also a crisis that’s inherent in the logic of capitalism.

Last month, The Millions entered the e-book publishing business with Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever. Staff writer Mark O'Connell has hitherto produced delightful work on, among other things, an obscure video game enthusiast named Martin Amis and "the Proust of pencil sharpeners." In Epic Fail, he traces the origins of viral fame to a pre-Internet age, squiring the reader effortlessly from Shakespeare to the Insane Clown Posse. Mark was kind enough to correspond with me for a Millions Conversation about his new book and early life as a middle school film critic.
Lydia: You and I are colleagues who have never met but maintain an infrequent friendly chatting over the Twitter and the emails. It's enough distance that I didn't know this project was in the works until C. Max Magee's general announcement to the group, but close enough that upon hearing the news I felt the special kind of chuffed you only feel over a friend's achievement. Epic Fail has the distinction of bringing The Millions into a new phase of its existence, as a purveyor of e-books, which is already very exciting. And then I read Epic Fail and felt even more chuffed. I really enjoyed it.
So now that I've buttered you up, I want to ask you about how this endeavor came about. Was this something you were working as a Millions or other piece that took on a life of its own? How long have you been thinking about the project? Our own Garth Risk Hallberg was your editor, I believe. When did he come on board?
Mark: Actually, I have to think quite hard to formulate a coherent answer to the straightforward question of how it came about. Max got in touch early last year, February or March I think, to say that he'd been talking to Byliner about partnering on an e-book series, and to ask whether I had any ideas I thought might work for such a piece. I'd read something somewhere about this Irish schoolteacher called Amanda McKittrick Ros, who'd become widely known around the turn of the 20th century as the worst novelist of all time. I was fascinated not so much by the novels themselves – which are truly atrocious, obviously, but mostly just incredibly dull to read – as by the ironic way they were celebrated by this cultural elite in London and Oxford - C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and Aldous Huxley and all those guys. I thought this was really interesting in itself, but also felt that it was a kind of fame or notoriety that we tend to think of as more or less uniquely contemporary. So I thought maybe this eccentric old Irish schoolteacher and amateur novelist might provide sort of a sneaky back door into a discussion of Internet culture, and of the whole ostensibly contemporary phenomenon of the Epic Fail. I'd been thinking about Ros as a possible topic for quite a while, but then this thing, because of the scope and length that the e-book allowed for, forced me to actually try and connect her to some wider and more contemporary cultural currents.
Garth came on board very early on - at the outline stage, in fact. He was really instrumental in helping to broaden it out conceptually in the beginning; and then, when it came to writing the thing, in sharpening actual arguments, and sort of forcing me to come out into the open and say things in a very unequivocal way. Like yourself, I come from an academic background, where things like concision and having a solid "takeaway" are, or are supposed to be, paramount; but I think, constitutionally, I'm the type of writer who only figures out what I'm trying to say – or if indeed I have anything to say at all – by blindly writing my way into it. I'm not naturally a bottom-line type of person who goes in with an argument in mind, is what I think I might be saying here (see?), but Garth really stepped in and sort of forced me to be that when I needed to be.
Lydia: That was what I found most enlightening about the essay -- in terms of information I did not have before -- that these literary lights of the early twentieth century went into ironic ecstasies over Amanda McKittrick Ros, held readings, formed clubs. I knew that they were elitist dicks (not a value statement) but it's funny to think that they did something so, I guess, unproductive and time-wastey, as read these awful, awful novels, like looking at lots of YouTube videos (shouldn't C.S. Lewis have been communing with the Lord?). But then, that's one takeaway of Epic Fail -- the thing with Ros and all the Worst Thing Evers to have followed, is that they either rise into some ethereal, sublime level of badness, or are so unheimlich in their nearness to regular mediocrity (or a combination of both), that it makes them special. (I loved, incidentally, your point about the virulent, absurd badness that actually infects the entirety of literature and art -- let's come back to that.)
I see now there are two untrue things about my first sentence above, the first being that this was the best new information I gleaned from this piece. Because that was actually the song "Miracles," and also the song "Friday," which I had in fact made it this far without ever hearing in its entirety. I had sort of willfully not clicked on it, because I kept seeing it everywhere and I guess that was my way of keeping my own ironic distance. So, um, thank you for those things. You do realize you kind of wrote a hypertext book, because you can't read it and not go digging for, er, miracles, on the internet?
And, truly, the most enlightening thing was learning about Mark O'Connell's rap phase. Although you're a tease -- first you talk about washing the lemon juice from your face (buy the book, get the reference) and lifting the veil from your readers' eyes, then you talk about the Irish rap scene, and I was in a fever of anticipation that the next thing coming was the revelation that you had done your own Worst Thing Ever, and that it was a rap, and that possibly there were bootleg tapes about. But it turns out that the secret shame -- which was a transcendent bit of prose, incidentally -- is actually that you once did something really dickish yourself to an aspiring rapper. A different kind of worst thing ever.
In the beginning of the piece, your compare Cecilia Jimenez, the perpetrator of the Ecce Homo Christ fresco fiasco, to your grandmother, and you invoke the term "mortify" in the Catholic sense. Another Catholic word occurred to me when I got to this last bit of the book: penance. Sorry in advance for sounding like Geraldo, but had this been eating away Was your ebook, dare I say, an exorcism?
Mark: I can't believe you'd never actually heard "Friday." That is hugely impressive to me. Although I can see how you'd want to avoid that stuff, or just never end up actually giving it the time of day. I don't think I've watched more than a few seconds of Gangnam Style, actually (although that's a whole other cultural ball of wax, obviously).
That's interesting what you said about it being a kind of hypertext ebook. I don't think it really occurred to me when I was writing it, which seems completely idiotic now. But then after I finished it, I wrote this essay about unboxing videos for The Dublin Review, and the editor, Brendan Barrington, pointed out that having it on ink and paper actually made a lot of sense, because if it was online, the temptation for the reader -- even if the text itself wasn't full of links -- would be to just keep going away from the actual text to watch the videos being discussed. I wound up putting in a perhaps overly-cute footnote asking readers to just bear with me and watch the videos after finishing the essay, rather than whipping out their iPhones there and then. And then a couple of my friends who read Epic Fail said exactly what you've just said: that they kept having to put it down to go online and watch the stuff I was writing about. I suppose that would be even more pronounced if you happen to be reading it on an iPad, where you're just swiping away the text to check out some awful YouTube video. Maybe a major flaw of the book, in that sense, is that it keeps suggesting things to the reader that are more entertaining than itself.
That's another thing that never occurred to me at all -- that a reader might think that the revelation at the end would be that I myself was a Worst Thing Ever. (Although of course I've done embarrassing stuff. Just probably nothing that would be entertaining for anyone who didn't know me.) But it's an interesting question, about the idea of penance. It's a concept I don't really understand. I didn't have a Catholic upbringing, so maybe it's a difficult thing to get your head around if it hasn't been part of your psycho-cultural make-up. Personally, I didn't feel any kind of relief from writing about the dickishness you mention. It actually just made me feel really awful about it all over again. In that sense, it's probably the opposite of penance; my writing about it actually exacerbated my guilt about it. I mean, obviously we're not exactly talking about an Augustinian level of moral self-disburdening here, but I do think that that's the sort of niggling, more or less banal guilt that a lot of people walk around with, and that makes them wince when they think about it. Some really shabby thing they did when they were a teenager, or whatever.
But to answer your question about whether the book was an exorcism, the answer, I suppose, would be definitely not. Or at least it would be a spectacularly ineffective exorcism, seeing as I felt more possessed by it after writing about it than before. I just felt it would have been dishonest and sort of morally shifty not to talk about myself, and my own personal complicity in this culture of ridicule, in terms of the context I was writing in. Although I'm not convinced there's not something morally shifty about it anyway. Writing is a morally shifty thing to be doing, a lot of the time.
What would Geraldo say to that?
Lydia: Well, I didn't imagine you sitting at your carrel in a hair shirt. But I think the thrust of the book does invite everyone to put on at least a moderately hairy shirt and do a bit of reflection. I confess when I did watch "Friday," and thought uncharitable thoughts, I was brought a bit low by the gallantry, or I guess basic human decency, you extend to Ms. Black. And while I had hitherto missed the "Friday" phenomenon, I had seen, and laughed the proverbial tits off while seeing, monkey Jesus. I found your comparison of Cecilia Jimenez to your own grandmother, your touching description of the latter as "a constitutionally private, reserved, and serious person," and your remark that "if something like this were to happen to her, I'm afraid it might literally kill her," sobering. The dicks of the early twentieth century argued, probably on the way home from their Amanda McKittrick Ros fan club meetings, about whether art could be good without a moral component. And I'm stodgy and I feel that's the case, so what I perceived as a slight bit of moralizing on your part made the piece resonate with me. But since you have a sense of humor, (number-one most desirable quality in a writer), you don't try to act as though these things aren't hilariously bad. You just provide a friendly reminder that the road of the Worst Thing Ever in the technological age is one hundred percent of the time going to lead to a YouTube comment saying "I hope you die/get raped/etc."
I was probably projecting about the rap stuff. In my experience the only thing that approaches the shame of shabby teenage things done is the shame of ludicrous teenage things written. And when I think about "Friday" and then some of the horrible things I wrote in high school or college, I offer a prayer or thanks to the monkey Jesus that I did not have to bear that particular cross at a time in my development when I would have been constitutionally disinclined to survive sustained mockery.
Having managed to turn your interview into my personal feelings time, let's go back to Epic Fail. You mentioned Gangnam Style, and I thought of that phenomenon while reading. The same way that truly terrible efforts can, as you write, infect the whole of art with their badness, good writing invites the mind to romp. Epic Fail caused me to spend a Saturday afternoon sort of furiously taxonomizing, trying to sort through the spiritual differential of something like the film The Room, or something that seems well-produced and self-consciously zany (and thus, I think, unexciting) like Gangnam Style, or terrible Eurovision-style songs, or Susan Boyle, or the (brilliant) show Arrested Development. It sounds like faint praise to call something "tidy," but I really admire how you (with Garth's careful shepherding, it sounds like) avoided getting bogged down in trying to explain the whole landscape of viral fame, and list all the sort of subspecies and things that are not x but are y and so on. Your examples seemed really exemplary, and the whole effort was very clean.
That said, it's such a vast field of inquiry, with many tributaries (I think I have like 200 metaphors in here so far). Do you feel finished thinking about it? You said in your last response that you feel more possessed by the subject than before. Would you consider a long-long-form on this topic?
Mark: Can I just start by saying that the phrase "laugh the proverbial tits off" is itself a phrase that makes me laugh the proverbial tits off? But, to swiftly resume an attitude of moral seriousness – before no doubt just as swiftly relinquishing it – your point about things you did as a kid in high school is an important one, I think. Because part of what's so fascinating and troubling about this stuff is the almost complete randomness of it. You get the sense that this kind of viral celebrity could befall almost anyone. (Which is maybe, actually, another way of thinking about what the term "viral" actually means in that formulation.)
We've all done stuff to some extent that could make us a source of amusement to a large number of people. I was just thinking the other day of this notebook I used to keep when I was about eleven or so, where I used to write in little reviews of films I'd watched on video. My sister found it in a drawer a few years back, and it had these hilariously po-faced reviews of movies where I'd give star ratings and list cast members and stuff like that. But the combination of wrongness and priggishness was kind of fantastic. Like there was a review of Glengarry Glen Ross (and I'm laughing just thinking about this) where I took grave umbrage at the unnecessary level of swearing in the film – "the characters seem to use f-words instead of punctuation" – and gave it 2 stars, memorably dismissing it as "a waste of an all-star cast." And then you turn the page and there's a five star review of Sister Act 2 that is just enraptured with the whole thing. I mean, if I was an 11 year-old kid nowadays, that would probably be a Tumblr or something, and those reviews could have wound up being a source of amusement to a lot of people outside my family, which would be a whole other story. Like that lady who reviewed an Olive Garden for her local paper last year and briefly became the Internet's woman of the hour. It's just very weird how randomly that stuff can happen. She seemed fine with it; she ultimately seemed not to give a rat's ass, but not all octogenarians would be so cool about something like that happening. I kind of love that woman actually. Her whole reaction was basically "What the hell is wrong with you people? Get back to work."
Yes, I know what you mean about that taxonomizing urge. (If it weren't too aggressively meta, the whole human species might have been taxonomized as Homo Taxonomiens.) It was definitely a temptation for me, but I don't think it would have been all that helpful for the reader. Although I do talk at one point about the difference between "organic" or "free-range" epic fails and genetically engineered weirdness like Tim and Eric and that sort of stuff. I don't know that I'd want to write a whole book on it, because I feel like I'd like to move on to something else, but you never know. I do seem to be preoccupied by Internet weirdness. That unboxing video essay consumed me for a long time - and to be honest the essay became a sort of cover story for indulging that compulsion - and I've just finished writing a thing about ASMR videos for Slate. You're welcome. But who isn't fascinated by that stuff, really? (The answer to that rhetorical question is actually, no doubt, lots of normal people.)
Lydia: The juxtaposition of Glengarry Glen Ross and Sister Act 2 in the notebook of Mark O'Connell, aged 11, the toughest critic on the block, is such pure comedy that I think the writers of Arrested Development would really struggle to find something as home-grown and delightful (local, organic, free-range fails, if you will). All the better because this was probably just before (or concurrent with) the moment when, according to your book, you yourself became hip to the joys of "entertaining ineptitude" and found nothing funnier than the vast distance between ambition and execution.
Which brings me to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a part of your book that I found really fascinating. Brutally paraphrasing, Science has proven that the more of an idiot you are, the greater your confidence that you aren't an idiot. It occurs to me that in a sense being a kid is one sustained exercise in Dunning-Krugerism. In fact, arguably to be a proper kid you need those moments of total unselfconscious and total commitment -- it's hateful to think of a child having to posit his or her movie reviews or, ahem, paeans to exotic cats and cars, in some ironic, self-conscious frame. Once you get to middle and high school and college, where there are strange and multifarious forces at work -- your teachers try to nurture your better instincts and squelch your worse ones, while you and your peers spend much of your time trying feel one another up whilst putting one another down -- slowly you learn to think about your output (artistic or otherwise) in a different way.
In terms or raw artistic ability, the wheat and the chaff alike have to go through this process of maturation. But your A. M. Ros, your Tommy Wiseau (of The Room), somehow come through it all with a really majestic, unshakable belief in their own ability that certainly exceeds that of people who really make great art. (When I read Epic Fail I was in the middle of re-reading Of Human Bondage -- have you read it? -- which has a whole section on artistic toils. Everything synced together beautifully at the moment when Philip the protagonist asks a professional painter to look over his work and give an opinion: "Don't you know if you have talent?" the painter asks, and Philip says, "All my friends know they have talent, but I am aware some of them are mistaken.")
Okay, so you don't want to write a book about YouTube comments. I will forgive you. But according to your bio in Epic Fail you have a book on the horizon -- about John Banville? Please to explain.
Mark: I have read it, but it was years ago. Actually, it was one of the first bits of "proper/serious" literature I ever really connected with - as in it wasn't about dragons or aliens or what have you. I don't remember all that much about it, but I do remember the business with the club foot, and that Mildred girl being a total bitch. (Am I somehow wrong in remembering it this way?) (Ed.: No.) I do remember being really impressed with myself for finishing it, though. I should probably read it again, through not-15-year-old eyes. I almost certainly didn't get it at all. But yeah, the Dunning-Krueger effect is a good one, isn't it? The ironic thing about it, of course, is how primed for misuse it seems to be. The last people who would ever see it applying to themselves are probably the people most affected by it. It's a usefully scientific-seeming way of explaining why other people are such idiots. Why "The best lack all conviction while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity", as Yeats put (it in a context so different as to make even bringing it up here wildly inappropriate). I do think most writers - most people, really - could probably do with a touch of the William McGonagall or Amanda McKittrick Ros or Tommy Wiseau unshakable self-belief. If you could somehow combine that with actual talent, you could do a very brisk artistic trade. That's possibly some kind of formula for genius: major talent combined with the self-belief that's more often associated with talentlessness.
I do have a book on Banville on the horizon. Last I heard it's due to come out in July or thereabouts. It's based on my PhD thesis, which I finished a couple of years ago now. It looks at Banville's novels from the point of view of various psychoanalytic understandings of what narcissism means. It sounds quite narrow, but narcissism is so variously and broadly interpreted by theorists from Freud onwards that it's actually become almost like a kind of synonym for psychoanalysis itself. Even though it contains no quips about Trapped in the Closet, it will nonetheless be tremendous fun to read, I assure you.
Lydia: Well, two things are clear. Number one, I must pray for "major talent combined with the self-belief that's more often associated with talentlessness." Number two, I must read John Banville.
Mark, I can't thank you enough for chatting with me about yourself and your wonderful book. Any parting thoughts or, better yet, YouTube videos?
Mark: It's unacceptable that you haven't read Banville. That needs to be redressed straight away. Unfortunately none of his books are set in Turkey, but there are parts of The Book of Evidence and Shroudthat are set in a kind of warped version of San Francisco, if that's any good to you.
Thanks for the back-and-forth, Lydia. It was a lot of fun. Like a proper old-fashioned epistolary set-up. Plus this whole thing has been a textbook example of vertical integration, when you think about it.
Lydia: I hate that I just had to google vertical integration, but am also grateful to now know what that means. Ye olde one-stoppe shoppe, that's us.

“Have you ever taken the Myers-Briggs personality test?” asks novelist Jane Smiley. “Well, I have and my personality comes up as ‘improviser.’ That’s me.”
We are having lunch at a pricey seafood restaurant overlooking the water on an unseasonably sunny autumn afternoon in Vancouver, and Smiley is explaining how she plotted Some Luck, the first in a sprawling trilogy of novels that tells the story of the American Century through the lives of the seven members of one Iowa farming family. First, she says, she laid out some simple ground rules for herself. The book would begin in 1920 and end in 2020, with each short chapter covering a year, and the prose style would be straightforward and unfussy. Once she had decided on the basic outlines for the trilogy, she sat down and got to work. “I just started and let them live,” she says of her characters. “I knew when they were going to be born, and that’s all I knew.”
This looseness of design shows in Some Luck, which was longlisted for the National Book Award when it was published earlier this fall. At times, especially in the earlier chapters, not much seems to be happening. Major historical events -- the stock market crash, the rise of Adolf Hitler in Europe -- scud past like clouds on a distant horizon as the Langdons, Smiley’s farming family, plow their fields and care for their children and worry about the weather and crop prices. Characters appear out of nowhere, as if pulled from the author’s back pocket, and take up central roles in the narrative. But slowly, like images from an old-fashioned Polaroid, the characters come to life on the page, smart and quirky and full of opinions, until, by the end of the first volume, one is hooked -- not so much to find out what will happen, but to know whom these people will become, what fate has in store for them.
Vital to this narrative pull is the Langdons’ eldest son Frank, who is the closest thing to a protagonist in Smiley’s crowded cast of characters. Headstrong and smart, Frank thrives by upending the expectations of his parents, and later the world around him. “It was beyond Frank to understand why he sometimes did the very thing he was told not to do,” Smiley writes early on, when Frank is still a boy. “It seemed like once [his parents] told him not to do it -- once they said it and put it in his mind -- then what else was there to do?” Frank’s father, Walter, beats him with a belt until Frank is “too confused by pain” to count off the blows, but when it’s over, it’s clear that the lesson Frank has learned is not that he shouldn’t disobey his parents, but that his will is stronger than theirs.
There is a touch of the charming sociopath in Frank -- later in the book, he is recruited to root out spies for J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI -- but only a touch. Mostly, he is a survivor, a man determined to live life on his terms. This is true of all the members of the Langdon clan, who are each in their own way attempting to break out of a mold the world has shaped for them. “One of the things that goes through all three novels is characters attempting to live with and make something of what’s happening around them,” Smiley explains. “They’re not defying it. They’re not living back in the Ozarks and going against the grain. People don’t do that in Iowa. They’re attempting to make something of what is happening around them. They all mean well.”
Before our seafood lunch, during a panel discussion at the Vancouver Writers Fest where Smiley was appearing to promote Some Luck, she told the crowd that she had conceived of the Langdon trilogy as a single long story and had originally envisioned stopping each volume in the middle of a sentence, which would then be picked up in the next volume. Her publishers wouldn’t let her do that, but she says she still views the three books as a single continuous ribbon of narrative, each volume covering a third of a century in the lifetimes of the rapidly expanding Langdon clan. (Volume two, Early Warning, which takes the characters up to the 1980s, is due out this spring; and the final, as yet untitled volume is scheduled for fall 2015.)
The idea for the trilogy, Smiley says, arose in part out of her fury over the political situation in the U.S. since the Bush Administration and a desire to understand “how the country got where it is today.” She set the book in Iowa farm country, territory she explored in her 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, because she wanted to cut through contemporary Americans’ ignorance about where their food comes from. “We forget,” she says. “We know, but we forget. We think it comes from the grocery store. There’s this constant tension in American life about, ‘Does my food come from General Mills or does it come from the ground?’”
Smiley addresses this tension directly in the later chapters of Some Luck, set during the postwar years, when Frank’s younger sister, Lillian, marries and leaves Iowa for Washington D.C. to begin raising her family. The child of a father who farmed oats and couldn’t start his day without a bowl of oatmeal, Lillian is stunned to discover Cheerios at the neighborhood supermarket. She is also delighted to be able to feed her son formula made with purified city water in sterilized bottles, rather than breastfeed.
For Smiley, Lillian’s attraction to these consumer conveniences is a rational response to a childhood spent on a hardscrabble rural farm, but also emblematic of how an entire generation allowed itself to be “suckered” into a reliance on corporate America. “I love Lillian,” says Smiley, “but the way she chooses to feed the kids, the way she chooses the cereals she chooses, she’s a sucker. She thinks, ‘We’ve skirted along the edge of serious food-borne illnesses [growing up on the farm] and so: I believe. I believe that General Mills is going to give me something more nutritious and more safe than what I grew up with. I believe I don’t want manure in the yard.’ Well, that’s the way we felt in the '50s.”
Smiley herself was born in 1949 and grew up in Webster Groves, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. She moved to Iowa in her early 20s for graduate school and remained in the state for more than two decades, teaching at Iowa State University until the mid-1990s when she moved to the coastal resort town of Carmel, Calif., where she now lives with her fourth husband, a real estate developer. Though A Thousand Acres, the book for which she is perhaps best known, is also set in Iowa, her fiction has traveled widely in the course of her long career. One early novel, The Greenlanders, is set among the Norse peoples of 14th-century Greenland. A more recent book, Ten Days in the Hills, loosely based on Giovanni Boccaccio’sDecameron, is set in Hollywood during the early days of the Iraq War.
In the case of the Langdon trilogy, Smiley says she set out to tell the story in simple, unadorned prose. “One of the things I was doing while I was starting to write this book was reading a lot of Alice Munro,” she says. “Alice Munro writes in a very straightforward style, and that allows her to take up a lot of issues and discuss a lot of things because you trust her.”
The novel’s omniscient narration, which weaves between characters, sometimes directly accessing their innermost thoughts, and at other times merely reporting their outward actions, allows Smiley to cover a great deal of ground. In the first volume, the reader becomes immersed in life on a small Midwestern farm without running water or tractors, then is whisked off to North Africa and Italy where Frank serves as a sniper in the U.S. Army during World War II, and lands finally in early-'50s suburban Washington and New York where Cold War-era paranoia reigns.
Asked how she mastered the details of these wide-ranging worlds, Smiley offers a modest authorial shrug. “I’m not a scholar,” she says. “I don’t have to master it. I only have to appear to master it. Some things are fairly self-contained, so in order to appear to master them, you just to learn the facts and think about it and figure it out. Other things are not so self-contained so you have to spend more time trying to sort out what’s essential and what’s not essential.”
Much of classic 20th-century fiction, she acknowledges, operated on a narrower scale, focusing on the author’s subjective filter on the world rather than on the world itself. Even today, authors can be reluctant to venture too far from their own experience, fearing that they have no right to tell a story that doesn’t belong to them. This, clearly, does not count as one of Smiley’s chief fears. “The question, as I view it, isn’t ‘What right do I have to do this?’ but ‘Just try and stop me,’” she says. “The reader is the one who decides whether you have the right to do it or not. Your job as an author is to draw the reader in, and to get the reader to willingly suspend disbelief. I don’t have to second guess myself already. The reader’s there to second-guess me. That’s his job or her job.”

2 comments:

If you’re serious about Writing, develop a serious strategy in which you will earn money from something other than Writing. Marry a rich person, prostitute a second talent as shamelessly as is legal, or (the smartest option) have wealthy and extremely supportive parents. Writing for money in even the best economies (and when was that, last?) will cast a sheepish shadow across your page; a creative eye on the market soon withers.

I don’t care if the dabblers take this advice or not but I do hope someone with fire and talent sees it and nurtures A Gift, that way, to such an extent that I get a readable or even inspiring book, to read, that was written more recently than the late ’90s. Because it has been a rough decade or two. More tepid excursions in the sentimental than one could warehouse in a blimp hangar…

Here’s my contribution to this discussion: It took you two years to produce this book, but it took me forty seconds to find it online (for free), two minutes to remove the copyright page, the promotional pages, and whatever “anti-piracy watermark” your publisher thinks he put there, and then another thirty seconds to upload it to LibGen, where now anyone, from anywhere in the world, can download it for free (You can look it up on LibGen if you don’t believe me).

So, if I may add a question to that interview: does that make you rethink your business model? I’m not being facetious or snarky; I’m dead serious. Would it not have been preferable, for example, to release the book for free and then to ask for donations, 100% of which would have gone to you and your contributors and not to publishers, agents, publicists, etc.?

Aside from the money, the fame, and the groupies, publishing a literary magazine these days can be a thankless task. There are hundreds - maybe thousands - of good writers out there, but there are almost as many publications, and few of them pay professional rates. Print is expensive, and it can be difficult to develop a following outside the circle of writers who want to be published in your pages. Money is tight and hours long, as submissions flow in like water. Developing a distinctive and relevant sensibility is crucial.This week, The Millions interviews the editors of three quite unique new literary magazines: Canteen, [sic], and Tantalum. We also invite our readers to offer their comments on the state of the lit-mag union: How often do you read literary journals? What do you look for? What are the standout publications? What would it take to get you to subscribe?First up is Sean Finney, editor of the full-color, bicoastal literary feast Canteen. The first issue, featuring work by Andrew Sean Greer, Julie Orringer, David Shulman, and (full disclosure) yours truly, debuts this spring.The Millions: How do you distinguish yourself in a crowded marketplace?Sean Finney: There are, despite what many say, no shortage of good stories, poems, and articles. Each year there are more and each year it becomes easier to access them. Supply outpaces demand; thus indifference. But demand is growing for [publications] who sell not the literary and artistic product, but artistic participation. Create an M.F.A.-conferring magazine and it would sell. Canteen can't do that, so we try to lift the curtain on process in kinky ways that get [writers] excited. We also hope the vehicle itself is distinguished: a carefully designed print magazine with quality paper, binding, printing, and samples of artistic product too. Process has to get you somewhere, after all.TM: What are your wildest dreams for your publication? What do you need to realize them?SF: Raging parties with famous writers and libidinous sophisticates who buy tons of copies and make everyone at Canteen really popular. To achieve this we probably need a really hot band, preferably one you can talk over.TM: How did your first issue come together?SF: There's a now very popular and well reviewed San Francisco restaurant called Canteen. My friend Dennis Leary is the chef and owner who knew he had the skills to create a foodie pilgrimage, but he didn't dedicate the temple just to repast, so we created a high-powered literary salon over dinner and brief "intercourse" readings. The press liked it too. Stephen Pierson, our publisher, saw the germ of a magazine in the dinners. And here we are, named after a San Francisco restaurant and published in New York.TM: How do you support the endeavor economically?SF: We currently support the endeavor entirely through vice, the game of poker in particular. Our publisher is a fulltime online shark.TM: What responsibilities, if any, do the writing community and the publishing industry have toward little magazines?SF: The same responsibility that successful technologists and investors have towards high-tech incubators. That's an argument. But are little magazines investments for anyone in the established industry, or just responsibilities? Aren't they supposed to do the work of agents for free?Parts 2 & 3